[F8]Dev frame rate different from browser?

I've been working hard for weeks then I finally tested my game on a browser. I tried many different publish settings but I can't get the speed I see in the dev version (CTRL+ENTER). My game is just 400x300, tiled bitmap screen, maybe 30-40 mcs, 10 visible usually at a time. I don't scale anywhere.

In dev I can get 45 FPS or more, but testing on various browsers it only goes around 35 FPS or less. Is this a normal occurance? Should I trust what I'm seeing in the browser and dev for that speed?

Thanks!

It is completely normal. Flash movies have always been slower in the browser.

Does it make a difference if the bitmaps are GIF or PNG? There's something I'm doing wrong because Heli Attack has a lot more stuff going on than I do.

As to the browser slow down issue, I've posted a good link in the knowledge base which will help clear things up for you.

Bitmap wise, you're only going to get a performance decrease using png's which are alpha blended ( ie, 24bit pngs ).

Also it's pointless comparing a game to another one in terms of speed / objects ( Like the recent thread comparing a demo to Fancy Pants ), how it's actually coded has a big impact. iopred has probably done a lot of things differently internally to how you've done them, so it's just comparing apples and oranges.

Squize.

- cache as bitmaps (if you have vectors)
- scollable tile engine
- bitmap data (no flash vectors)
- smal screensize (aka on 640*480+)
- no flash gradients
...
just to name some

Thanks all. Squize can you post a link to that article, I'm not sure where to find that.

Knowledge base sticky at the top of this forum mate, second post in.

Squize.

Thanks!

For internet explorer if you use wmode = "transparent" when you embed your movie it will run at exact same speed as in a standalone player. It's as simple as that.

You can forget about all the other nonsense. This works every time unless you have something really fishy going on in your code.

But that breaks Flash games for FireFox, so either you have to have two versions, alienate a large percentage of your users, or preferably not use it :)

Squize.

You don't need to use transparent mode for Firefox. It all depends how you embed it.
So they will still get the same game they'd normally get, but there is no need to penalize IE users when there is a way to give them full frame rates.

Or you need to be careful about your interface. Key presses sometimes don't work in Firefox when using transparent mode, so if you can use mouse for everything.

But, check this out in Firefox http://www.deusx.com/football

Transparent mode is used for both, and you can control the keeper with keys even in firefox, but you can't use space key to curve the ball in firefox ( worth checking why exactly that is )

The wmode trick works great for my game on IE, it's perfect now. Wmode in Firefox doesn't seem to do anything, but it didn't look like it was broken either. Keys worked fine. Is there a way for Firefox to get near full frame rates too?

Edit: Nevermind Firefox keys were broken, I put the WMODE tag in the wrong place. But the speed was perfect.

weird. WMODE with FireFox is supposed to make it SLOWER.

Adobe open-sourced 130,000 lines of the Flash Player's source code (ie, the AVM - ActionScript Virtual Machine) for the Mozilla foundation recently (biggest donation they've ever received). I have high hopes that this wmode bug will be history when the next public release of Firefox comes out.

I Googled lots of info on wmode for Firefox, it seems it can't be fixed. You can do a onKeyDown/onKeyUp instead but that doesn't work well with games. This was a real buzz kill for me. If there is a work around please let me know.

This is like when I was making Java applets, everything was cool until I found out that you could not control frame rates properly in Windows because System.currentTimeMillis() was off. An obvious problem never fixed for so long.

firefox will be interesting for me with v3+ because right now its quite a mess (ram, performance). If I remember right v3 will be from the ground up renewed as alot of their libraries & code is from the old netscape days and isn´t up to date anymore.

I've used Firefox 3.0a (you can download WIP versions from their server), wasn't too impressed.

Does anyone recommend a good frame rate for an all bitmap game? Is 45 FPS too much to hope for? Or better yet what is the frame rate of Heli Attack? I'm kinda using that as my inspiration :)

Here's a scale of framerates:

11 fps - consistent speed on PCs and Macs
12 fps - half speed that eyes normally see motion at; basically double-framed professional animation, also default framerate in Flash for this reason
16 fps - speed at which eye can perceive things as a constant motion rather than a series of separate frames; minimum acceptable speed for a game to play at
21 fps - consistent speed on PCs and Macs
24 fps - speed at which eyes normally see motion at; used in professional animation, best if you want to show organic movement fluidly
31 fps - smooth, consistent speed on PCs and Macs; used in the vast majority of Flash games, and also about the highest speed you can reasonably expect the Flash Player to keep up
50 fps - framerate of PAL television broadcasts
60 fps - framerate of NTSC television broadcasts
120 fps - maximum framerate in Flash, only usually used in speed experiments

Generally you lose about 10 fps from playing something in the browser, so for browser versions of games, developers tend to raise the framerate.

In Firefox, after a few seconds of the game running, the framerate will permanently decrease by 7 fps (and nobody's quite sure why).

Thanks, yes 31 is the magic number. Too bad I made so much animation already. There should be a guide that's called "before you start trying to make a game in Flash you should know this". Or maybe I just didn't spot it here.

A few points I've picked up along the way that all relate to this thread.

1. It's possible to get preview speed in IE, but thats because IE will happily pull in all the system resources the plugin asks for, whilst firefox doesn't seem to let anything max out. IE is better if your game isn't sharing system resources with anything else, but IE will suffer a greater speed hit when a game suddenly starts sharing a page with lots of ads.

2. Wmode does weird things to flash/firefox, especially with key input. Another bug that you might want to watch out for is that certain keys get translated from one keyboard layout to another. Try entering a @ symbol into an input field - with flash8/firefox/wmode(any)

3. Optimise your games from the beginning, both in terms of filesize and framerate. If you monitor both carefully as you go along and consider discarding/reworking anything that generates a noticable hit, you'll end up with pretty good results. Fixing this kind of stuff at the end is a nightmare.

4. Lastly, try to factor in changing framerates when you build the game, rather than hoping it'll play at the same speed on everyone's machine. Things like making the movement frame-independant, making graphical settings user or auto adjustable and maybe skipping a few of those cool particle effects if the fps drops below 25.

Just to show that it wont change in Flash9 either:
http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=118

Simple conclusion - higher framerate gives more inaccurate results between browsers, computers, other programs running, and all reasons you can think of.

And while not exactly into the subject, I still wish to link to bit-101 too:
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=910
I too like to use enterframe events instead of timers :)

Sorry man, but I have to correct a couple inaccuracies:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VENGEANCE MX

Here's a scale of framerates:
11 fps - consistent speed on PCs and Macs
12 fps - half speed that eyes normally see motion at; basically double-framed professional animation, also default framerate in Flash for this reason
16 fps - speed at which eye can perceive things as a constant motion rather than a series of separate frames; minimum acceptable speed for a game to play at
21 fps - consistent speed on PCs and Macs
24 fps - speed at which eyes normally see motion at; used in professional animation and projection cinema, best if you want to show organic movement fluidly
25fps - PAL video broadcast rate
30fps - NTSC video broadcast rate
31 fps - smooth, consistent speed on PCs and Macs; used in the vast majority of Flash games, and also about the highest speed you can reasonably expect the Flash Player to keep up
50 fps - framerate of PAL television; (Broadcasts use up 2 frames to form one image, so then a PAL television broadcast is actually 25fps); Console video games don't need to combine 2 frames, so they are capable of using the full available frame rate (50fps) if optimized properly.
60 fps - framerate of NTSC television; (Broadcasts use up 2 frames to form one image, so then a PAL television broadcast is actually 30fps); Console video games don't need to combine 2 frames, so they are capable of using the full available frame rate (60fps) if optimized properly.[/B]
120 fps - maximum framerate in Flash, only usually used in speed experiments

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I just didn't want anyone to confuse what a television is capable of displaying, versus what you actually get from a NTSC or PAL broadcast. Lucky for us, video games don't have to interlace two frames together.

Ah yeah, forgot about interlacing. Silly me. :)